On Apr 19, 10:15 pm, Molly Brown wrote:
On Apr 19, 6:02 pm, Evan wrote:



On Apr 19, 8:38 pm, Molly Brown wrote:

Is it more profitable to stop stocking the shelves a month before an
inventory like Home Depot does so that you have less to count so that
you don’t have to pay as much in wages for the inventory personnel or
to keep stocking the shelves so that you make-up the time/money you
lose doing the inventory by selling as much as possible?

LOL...

Home Depot has a contract with REGIS to do most of its regular
inventories... HD would pay the same amount for the crew to come
in and do the inventory whether it took 5 hours or 8 hours...

Spot check inventories of specific products or departments are
frequently ordered by District Management and Loss Prevention
personnel and either trusted store management employees will
do it internally or LP staffers from other stores will come in and
do it if store management is suspected to be involved in the shrink...

HD does not "stop stocking its shelves" a month prior to inventory,
the HD sales model is "just in time delivery" using a 1:1 item
replenishment system, one item ordered for one item sold...

~~ Evan

I won’t say what I do for a living but my job has me spend almost as
much time at Home Depot as my home. Based on my personal observations
of more than a decade; I can say without hesitation that they DO stop
stocking the shelves a month before inventory. In fact just before
inventory I notice those “sorry we are out” stickers multiply. When
ever that starts to happen at a branch I make it a point to go to
another nearby branch. On two occasions two Home Depot employees
admitted it when I loudly complained. Maybe they don’t do it in your
state where the minimum wage may be lower but here in California they
DO do it. I can’t say for other Home Depots in other states because
I’ve never been to one there.


LOL... The physical location of the Home Depot store in one state
or another has nothing to do with how HD conducts its business...

HD thinks globally and does its business on that scale allowing
for the regional management offices to adapt the operations to
the local rules (i.e. the type and design of the overhead racking
system is one of the most variable aspects of their operation as
each AHJ for each store might impose a different set of safety
requirements on rack performance; adapting the companies
staffing policies to local employment laws to maximize profit
with the least number of employees possible...)

Minimum wage rates don't affect how a store like HD operates
in fact in the same ten year period you site as your experience
in California at ONE or two stores, I can state for a fact that in a
dozen stores in Massachusetts which has the SAME minimum
wage as California that your observations about that one store are
not valid company wide... Now there is a possibility of different
regional policies, but your observations are better explained by
an incompetent store level manager working an understaffed and
therefore not profitable store rather than being reflective of the
successful HD global business model...

As far as the "sorry we are out" stickers... Did you happen to
note which item category those were located in ? Did you happen
to see if they were all common to one or two or a handful of product
vendors ? HD often embargos orders from certain vendors for a given
period of time until a large enough order to get a better price for
the
products can be made rather than ordering one box of something for
that one store... That process has nothing to do with inventory at
all
and the fact that you have observed that phenomenon around the
same time as an inventory was little more than coincidence...

~~ Evan